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This is the first installment of our newest online feature. The Dick Staub Interview will appear every Tuesday on our site. Staub, who hosts a daily radio show on Seattle's KGNW (also broadcast on cable's Total Living Network), is the author of Too Christian, Too Pagan: How to Love the World Without Falling for It. He's also the founder of the Center for Faith and Culture, which examines intersections between popular culture and religious belief. His interviews appearing on our site will examine many of these intersections, as he talks to writers, theologians, and other cultural influencers.

Our first Dick Staub interview is with comedian Richard Lewis, whom Mel Brooks called "the Franz Kafka of modern-day comedy." Known for his neurotic standup comedy driven by personal experience, he becomes even more personal in his recent book, delving into his alcoholism and spiritual recovery. Staub talked with Lewis shortly after the publication of the book, titled The Other Great Depression: How I'm Overcoming On a Daily Basis at Least a Million Addictions and Finding a Spiritual (Sometimes) Life.

You've been using your life as the source of your comedy, and now you take a whole different look at it.

I sure do. I've been in show business for 30 years, but the sole reason I went on stage back in '71 was to feel less alienated and to feel authentic somehow. The laughter did that.

What was the first time you remember making people laugh and thinking, "This is a way to get rid of some of my pain"?

I absolutely used humor for every defense mechanism you could think of. What finally happened was my dad died before I became a comedian. And I was writing these jokes, and the ones that were most personal, these comedians were rejecting. And the ones that were most observational they liked. But I had very little interest in writing about what other people think, what I think other people see.

Your father casts a huge shadow over this book. You write that you let your father "define you."

Yeah, I don't know if I let him as much as I had no choice. I sort of think that my father was an amazingly talented caterer. A workaholic, like I am, but he was never around. I never could be as big as him.

You make the statement repeatedly in the early parts of this book that you had no idea who you were. It's almost like there was nobody to be in reaction to. Is it the absence of the father?

I had a tough couple of years. I was there with my mom, who was drifting slowly but surely into her own world. The flip side of all this is that I can make light of it as a comedian and find the humor in it, thank God. But there was pain behind it all. I had millions of jokes and routines about feeling alienated, and when people laugh it's reassuring to them that they're not alone, and it's always reassuring to the artist. But at home, in reality, I really did feel alone.

It was not funny.

No, it was not funny.

When did your alcoholism start, how bad did it ultimately get, and what was driving it?

I think after I turned 30, I realized there's no looking back on this career. But I also said, "Wow, what if I don't make it?" I'm in a place where I'm judged every single night. On a television show, a Tonight Show, 10 to 15 million people can say thumbs up/thumbs down. And in nightclubs, drinking with people is constant. I don't know what the words are medically, but I soon became powerless over alcohol. I was just trying to obliterate my feelings, and not only the bad feelings. It turned out that I didn't even want to feel good. So, when I did Carnegie Hall back in the '80s, I got two standing ovations, and afterwards I was so uncomfortable in my own skin that I got so drunk I had very little recollection of it.

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June (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46